CAC to Present PearlDamour and Shawn Hall's HOW TO BUILD A FOREST This Month

The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC) announces HOW TO BUILD A FOREST, with performances from October 23-29, 2015.

Beginning in an empty space, visual artist Shawn Hall and theater/performance artists Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour (OBIE Award-winning PearlDamour) -along with a team of artists-will construct, dismantle, and remove an elaborately fabricated forest.Part visual art installation and part theater performance, this durationaleventunfolds over eight hours.Inspired by 100 trees lost at a Louisiana family home following Hurricane Katrina, HOW TO BUILD A FOREST is also strongly informed by the ecological consequences of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Audiences are welcome to come and go at any time during the performance.

Through visual art, performance, and sound design, HOW TO BUILD A FORESTarticulates the disconnect between urban dwellers and the natural world. The "forest," made of fabric and found materials, reflects the deeply interconnected relationship between humans and nature...how they live in it, rely on it, use it, and consume it. Using performance to explore our connection to a fragile environment, the artists expose both the creative and destructive processes that can apply to an art installation, a natural ecosystem, or the landscape of an entire city.

Katie Pearl and Lisa D'Amour have a 14-year history of creating performance work for theaters and non-traditional sites in New York, Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago and New Orleans as PearlDamour. Ranging from intimate to large-scale work, the duo is known for mysterious and often interactive work that combines theater with installation and is attentive to the performer-audience relationship. Their process is deeply collaborative and continually evolving, with a different writer/director/performer partner for each project. In 2003, they received an OBIE for Nita & Zita, which was created with Kathy Randels of ArtSpot Productions. HOW TO BUILD A FOREST was developed through residencies at The Mitchell Center for the Arts (Houston), Appalachian State University, and Hampshire College. PearlDamour are 3-time winners of the Rockefeller MAP Fund grant, and are 2009 recipients of a Creative Capital Award for the research, development and production of HOW TO BUILD A FOREST.

Lisa D'Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist whose plays have been commissioned and produced by theaters including The Women's Project, Playwrights' Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, and New Georges in NYC, Children's Theater Company (Minneapolis) and Steppenwolf Theater Company (Chicago). Steppenwolf's production of D'Amour's play Detroit, directed by Austin Pendleton, will transfer to Broadway in the 2011-12 theater season. Detroitwas a finalist for the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize and a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2008, D'Amour wrote and directed a performance for SWOON's Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, a flotilla of six boats created from salvaged materials that navigated the Hudson River in August 2009. As a playwright, D'Amour has received fellowships from the Jerome and McKnight Foundations, an independent artist commission from NYSCA (Stanley 2006, with her brother Todd D'Amour) and an NEA/TCG Playwrights' Residency. D'Amour was awarded the 2008 CalArts/Alpert Award for the Arts. She received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a core member of the Playwrights' Center and an alumna of New Dramatists. D'Amour splits her time between New York and her hometown of New Orleans.

Katie Pearl is a collaborative theater director who develops new plays and site-specific performance with writers, musicians and visual artists throughout the country. This has led to significant collaborations with Ellen Maddow of The Talking Band, Kirk Lynn of the Rude Mechs, and Steve Moore of Physical Plant Theater in Austin. Pearl has also developed projects with New Dramatists (NYC), the Playwright's Center (Minneapolis), PlayPenn (Philadelphia), Clubbed Thumb Summerworks, Ko Theater Festival, and St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab. Upcoming projects include the direction of Why We Have A Body by Claire Chaffee, which will open the Magic Theater's 2011-12 season (San Francisco). Pearl is a Drama League Directing Fellow, a Roothbert Fellow, a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Union, and a graduate of the University of Washington. She works frequently as a guest faculty member/director at University of Texas at Austin, Montclair University, and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Shawn Hall is a visual artist, primarily a painter, who also works in performance art, video, photography, installation, and- most recently-costume and set design and assemblage, including PearlDamour's OBIE Award-winningNita & Zita. Recent painting work reference Rorschach's, slide stains under a microscope, and acts of chance, presented in large grids of smaller pieces. Hall describes her work as a kind of Manifest Biology, quietly refuting the ruinous concept of Manifest Destiny. BIO logy, Hall's large scale 28 painting grid, became part of the Ogden Museum of Art's permanent collection in 2009, and was shown previously at the CAC in 2008 as well as in New York City during the TOAST Open Studios in 2006, where it was made. Hall received her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she was a Patricia Harris Fellow. She has been in residence at School 33 in Baltimore, LMCC in New York City and the 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed nationally in Art Papers, New Art Examiner, and Dialogue. She is a part of the permanent collection of The Ogden, Linklater Corporate collection in NYC, and private collections throughout the United States and Europe.

The CAC is a multidisciplinary arts center that is dedicated to the presentation, production, and promotion of the art of our time. As a cultural leader, it organizes, presents, and tours curated exhibitions, performances and programs by local, regional, national, and international artists. It demonstrates proactive local and regional leadership by educating children and adults, cultivating and growing audiences, and initiating and encouraging collaboration among diverse artists, institutions, communities, and supporters.

IF YOU GO:

HOW TO BUILD A FOREST

Friday, October 23, 2015-Thursday, October 29, 2015

Conceived by PearlDamour + Shawn Hall

Sound by Brendan Connelly

CAC Warehouse

900 Camp Street, New Orleans

Performance times at cacno.org

Free Admission

Additional Event - HOW TO BUILD A FOREST Panel: October 27, 7pm